Meet John McClintock. He's one of the Engineering Directors at the Industry Standard Servers and Software Business Unit in HP.

Performing SW and FW maintenance can be real pain. We know that. He's here to acquaint you with some important simplifications that HP has recently introduced in this space. These capabilities will provide you with better tools and information, allowing you to make good decisions about what updates affect you and how or if you should even be making these updates at all.

The SPP packages include firmware, drivers, utilities, agents, and other utilities required to support and maintain ProLiant servers and components in our blade enclosures. One stop shopping.

The components are:

Collected as a single package

Validated as a single solution

Documented as a single collection

And available on the web as a single package

He’ll show you exactly with a quick demo on the video.

SPP supports releases on BOTH rack servers and server blades, across the entire currently supported ProLiant portfolio.

The list of specific servers can be found on our web page, hp.com/go/spp.

SPP supports online FW and SW updates for Windows and Linux, and offline FW updates for any operating system.

It’s not a perfect world, unfortunately. So the SPP process includes the notion of “Hot fixes”. A hot fix is a FW or SW component update that has been reviewed and discussed internally that is deemed important enough to merit a special release outside the normal SPP packages.

Hot fixes will be tested against the current SPP but also earlier SPPs reaching back 12 months.

They are well documented to help you understand the change and the problem these fixes.

This enables you to “cherry pick” these updates as a practical way to manage the impact of these changes in the context of your business.

HP’s technical services will not arbitrarily require you to move to a newer SPP or hot fix without evidence that is needed to actually fix the problem.

We also want to make sure the transition to the new SPP processes is as straightforward as the SPP is itself.

To that end we will continue to support all the current delivery products, like the PSPs, the Firmware DVDs, and all the individual component releases with the same web interfaces through the middle of 2012.

Even when the transition completes, the old deliverables will remain on the web for archival access.

So, what to do next? Well, the best thing is to go out to the web page and give it a try.

It’s really easy to remember: it’s hp.com/go/spp and just follow the links.

Do you want to learn more about John? Take a look to his biography on the following video:

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